Causes of Corrupt Sectors on Hard Drive

Outlined below are some situations and things that may cause the sectors of the hard drive to be corrupt:

Power surges: This can be described as the situation that occurs when the power supply company supplies more electrical energy to the mains than the one expected. The power supply is usually greater than the one expected in our homes. In case a PC is connected to the socket and there is a power surge, there is a possibility that the PC may crash. The hard drive is electrical hardware and also can handle a certain amount of electrical energy. This means that any voltage above the normal will cause it to crash. The electrical power can affect the platters and cause corruption of the sectors in the platters. Let us take a hypothetical example where your hard drive is supposed to be supplied with 200 AC voltages to work properly. In case there is a power surge and 300 AC voltages is supplied your hard drive will crash. In short power surges are may cause corruption of the sectors and you may risk losing data.

Viruses: This is another common way that leads to corrupt sectors on the hard drive. Viruses are programs that change the original information of files stored on the hard drive. Computer viruses are similar to their medical counterparts where they infect a file and replicate themselves to affect other files. A brief explanation on the corruption is as follows:
When you save information on the hard drive it is stored in bytes i.e. 1’s and 0’s. What the virus program does is to change the original formation of the bytes into a form in which is non-interpretable for the computer to understand. This is basically how the sectors and files in the hard drive are corrupted. The viruses usually target the executable file i.e. files with the extension “.exe”. The viruses also cause corruption of other files including system files and thus, sometimes it becomes a problem for one to even boot their computers. This corruption of sectors and files in the hard drives may lead to data loss.

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